WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
intensely attuned to the sense of beauty, and this hypersensitiveness, coupled with the virility that so often accompanies strong intellectual power, induces amorous preoccupation. Goethe, Heine, and Schiller were born amorists. Rousseau was fickle. It is hardly necessary to add to the list of great men who have manifested the capacity for loving several women in succession, and not infrequently more than one at the same time.
The masculine bias for plural love must not, however, be over-estimated. There are, without question, men of the Western races to whom the bare idea of cohabitation, or casual sexual association, with more than one woman is supremely repugnant. Where monogamy is slowly taking the place of polygamy, we notice that men seek a compensation by forming a succession of single unions. This is the case among the Arabs, Moors, and Malays of to-day. Such a substitute for polygamous marriage is not repellent to a number of Europeans, and as a practice it is commoner than association with more than one woman at the same time. The latter form of irregularity is especially odious to a fair proportion of Western men, who may be classed biologically as monogamic by instinct.
Convention and public opinion, though often lax in the case of man's variability, are still a deterrent
297
